American History Tellers - The Cold War - Interview with Audra Wolfe and Patrick Wyman | 7
Episode Date: January 31, 2018We’re closing out our series on the Cold War with two interviews with fascinating historians. First, we’re talking with Audra Wolfe, the author of Competing with the Soviets: Science, Tec...hnology, and the State in Cold War America, and the writer of this first six-part series of American History Tellers. Then, we take a seat in the way-back machine with Patrick Wyman, host of the hit podcasts Fall of Rome and Tides of History. We’ll investigate how the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union compares to another much earlier rivalry between ancient Rome and the Sassanid Persians. They might not have pointed nuclear warheads at each other, but the conflict was nonetheless tense and protracted.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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From Wondery, this is American History Tellers.
Our history, your story.
I'm Lindsey Graham. Next week, we'll be back with the first episode in a brand new six-part series on Prohibition.
Please stick around to listen to a preview
at the end of this episode. But today, we'll be talking with two very special guests about
the Cold War, the author of our series, Audra Wolfe, and the historian and host of Tides
of History, Patrick Wyman. Before we talk with them, I want to thank you so much for
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Up first today, you'll hear from the woman who wrote this series, Audra Wolfe. She's a writer,
editor, and historian with an expertise in the science of the Cold War. Her most recent book
is Competing with the Soviets, Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America.
Coming in the fall of 2018, her newest book, Freedom's Laboratory, The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, focuses on the role of science as a form of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.
Audra joined me via Skype from her home in Philadelphia.
Here's our conversation.
We had only six episodes to cram in almost 60 years of material.
One thing that I thought was really inviting about the way you structured these six episodes
was it wasn't necessarily chronological, nor was it fundamentally thematic.
How did you approach writing within these constraints?
And what did you leave out?
You know, we made a choice in the show to
really highlight political histories told through the experience of everyday Americans. But, you
know, this show was in many ways about kind of the big political ideas of the Cold War, these ideas
of containment, these ideas of the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.
And so I think that was, I do think
that these are probably the most important messages to convey about the Cold War. But anytime that
you're telling a political story, it means that you don't have as much time to talk about some
of the social history stories. Let me figure out your career. Did you start in science or did you
start in history? Well, I actually started in science. I have dual undergraduate
degrees in chemistry and biochemistry. But towards the end of my undergraduate career,
I was doing undergraduate research. And I was told that I was asking the wrong kinds of questions.
I didn't trust the equipment. And I always wanted to know, how do we know what we know?
So an advisor strongly suggested that I check out history of science, and I loved it.
So I ended up going to a graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. I have a PhD in history and sociology of science.
And so I was studying basically science from the Cold War.
A version of science from the Cold War is what my dissertation was about.
So I've been editing and writing about various parts of history, and in some cases
about science, for the past 15 years now. And you have a book about the history of the Cold
War competing with the Soviets? I do, I do. So my first book, Competing with the Soviets,
is really a study of the ways that science was used to maintain and project state power during
the Cold War. It's kind of a
greatest hits book. It does cover some surprising episodes, but it also covers things like
the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project, the Star Wars Initiative under the Reagan
administration. So it's really all about big science, and it's about the stuff of science,
how scientific ideas were used to drive national security during that time period.
A really interesting period in American history.
Well, you mentioned the Manhattan Project and Star Wars and Apollo program, all of which we got to on American History Tellers.
But you also said that there are some surprising moments.
Can you tell us one of those?
Absolutely. So one of the things that I did in that book, which, you know, obviously some of my obsessions about science and the Cold War are very evident in my treatment of the Cold War for American history tellers.
But I think it's really critical to think about the social sciences during this time period.
So Competing with the Soviets has a chapter about the Great Societies programs under Johnson, because these programs were really made
possible by new ways of thinking about solving social problems. And the idea was that if
scientists could solve these problems, if scientists could use social scientific techniques
to prevent nuclear war by doing things like game theory, then surely they could solve the problems
of poverty. So one of the really interesting things about the Great Society programs that we don't talk about in American History Tellers,
but written about elsewhere, is how many of these Great Society programs were actually driven by scientists who had done work for the military.
Some of them came from the RAND Corporation, which was a, you know, obviously the RAND Corporation still exists.
It's a nonprofit institution that originally started to give advice to the Air Force. But in the late 60s,
they got really involved in urban policy, in combat, in poverty eradication efforts,
all kinds of urban planning, even traffic flow studies. So a lot of the great society programs
drew really heavily on kind of a faith in science and the social sciences to solve all kinds of problems.
Do you think that that faith in science is appropriate, that it worked?
Well, you know, I'm a historian, so it's always hard to get me to answer yes or no to any question.
I would say yes and no.
I think the idea that science could solve problems in a straightforward technocratic way was probably misplaced.
And we see legacies of that today when people turn to science and hope that some scientists can just offer a up or down, yes or no answer to any number of questions.
You know, most of the major problems that the United States and the world faces today are complicated questions that have technical and maybe some scientific components. And it's important, it is certainly important
and essential to get the scientific and technological parts of those questions right.
But they're not just scientific and technological questions. They're also political questions,
or maybe they're social questions, or they're questions about what it is that a culture values.
And, you know, during the Cold War, for a variety of reasons, many people were willing to put more trust in scientists to just solve problems as scientific problems. And that, you know, presented certain challenges.
I think we see that in the example of Project Plowshare, which we talked about in Episode 4.
The idea that you could just use kind of bombs to build
things because bombs are really good at making holes. That is one approach to a problem, but it's
not necessarily a holistic problem to questions of infrastructure. Yeah, I have to say one of the
most remarkable pieces of information I learned in this series was Project Gas Buggy. That they
actually detonated a bomb underground
to try and extract natural gas.
Yes, yes.
I would say everything about Project Plowshare
is pretty remarkable,
including the fact that there were some detonations.
And of course, they didn't quite go as planned.
You can't generate clean natural gas
via atomic explosions,
or at least you can't generate usable natural gas
via atomic explosions. But at least you can't generate usable natural gas via atomic explosions.
But, you know, there was such a deep desire to find something useful from these devices.
It's understandable why the scientists wanted to find something useful in it.
You know, it does seem like something that if people had thought more clearly about,
more carefully about, if there had been broader public input into,
perhaps it might have gone in a different direction.
So I'm thinking about your focus and career coming up through science and then into the
history of science, and then a focus on the Cold War. And I was wondering what about the Cold War
fascinated you so much, but then it occurred to me that this was really the largest, fastest,
biggest improvement in science we've probably ever seen up until that point.
Yeah. I mean, you've put your finger on it and it wasn't just the growth in science,
but the growth of scientific authority. So as I mentioned, I was an undergraduate in biochemistry
and this was the 90s when everybody was talking about the human genome project.
And so, you know, in the 90s, it seemed like every week there was another story in the newspapers that scientists had found a gene for X or scientists who had found a gene for Y.
And I was really interested in this question about why people who were writing about science
were so willing to give scientists authority over any
number of aspects of American life. And it turns out if you want to think about the relationship
between science and authority and power in American life, you have to understand the Cold War.
So that's really how I got interested in the Cold War in the first place, was trying to think about
where this idea of scientific authority came from, that you could look to scientists as some kind of oracle about, you know, any number of problems. So that really does stem from a post-war kind of thinking
that came out of the Manhattan Project and the law. The title of this podcast is American History
Tellers, but obviously the Cold War has a lot to do with Soviet history and Chinese history
as well. I was wondering, from a scientific history point of view, there was
clearly the space race, but did we compete with them in any other scientific or technological
ways that were interesting or really competitive? Well, you know, you mentioned the space race,
and that's an obvious one. And, you know, the nuclear arms race was in some ways a technological
race. So that is also a part of that story.
But, you know, and there were any number of small stories that one could look at,
whether in the question of peaceful nuclear power or solar energy generation or water
desalination was another one that the Kennedy administration in particular was really excited
about, you know, possibly having a great scientific
breakthrough in water desalination. But, you know, I think that the bigger trend here is really about
just using science itself as a way to compete. You know, which nation was generating more PhDs?
How many scientists were there per capita? You know, who was producing more journal articles. This idea that science
itself, kind of the idea of science could be something that you could compete on,
is really intriguing, including even the ways that you do science. Do you do science kind of
in a directed way from the center, which was what was happening in the Soviet Union,
or do you decentralize it and let the scientists make the decisions themselves, which was the model that the United States was
following in the National Science Foundation? It's a really interesting time where a lot of
ideas are bubbling up, not only in terms of the objects of science, but really ideas of science
as a field for competition. And do you think that's why, for instance, towards the end of the Cold War,
it was American scientists and researchers
that came out with semiconductors, personal computers,
the beginnings of the internet?
Well, you know, these innovations
were very much connected to the investment
of the federal government.
So on the one hand of the United States,
during the Cold War, American scientists in particular used this language of free enterprise
and free scientists and that they were doing things kind of undirected. At the same time,
this was a period of time where the United States government invested more directly
into research than in any other period in American history. And particularly in the
industries that had some connection to the defense industry, like electronics. You know, in some fields, 75% of the funding, even in private
corporations, was coming from government research. So, you know, yes, in some ways, some of the
innovations in which the United States had some really important breakthroughs, particularly in
computing, absolutely are related to some of these ideas about how science should function, but not necessarily in the way that you would think.
It's not necessarily because it was driven by free enterprise, but because the state was investing
in innovation and absolutely investing in certain kinds of technologies just in a way that they have
never before or since. So science, well, it hopes to be in a pursuit of objective truth.
And in many ways, history does the exact same thing.
We want to know what happened, what actually happened.
But history remains a very subjective and controversial sometimes topic.
How is it that as we study history, our opinions change so much throughout
the time? We adopt different lenses, and even two historians looking at the same set of facts or
primary evidence can come up with different conclusions.
Well, no two historians are the same, and I think no two historians would have the same
answer to that question. Really, I think there are three ways of right history, and one is,
the first is really heritage, which is not something that professional historians do
as much. The idea of heritage is really writing history for the purpose of celebration and
memorializing the past and finding things that we want to really hold up and celebrate. And so
sometimes when historians are told, when members of the public hear something that historians are writing and say that it's not objective, what they're referring to is maybe the historians don't necessarily just want to celebrate, that they want to really capture the past as it was at a particular
moment of time. And then there are historians who want to write about the past, understand the
present. I very much put myself in that second category. For me, that's really the point of
understanding the past is what can we learn from this to get a better sense of our contemporary
moment? But what that means when you're doing that kind of history is that you're always looking at things that you're interested in now, right? So, you know,
as a historian of science, those being my particular interests, I have been very interested
in questions of scientist power and scientist authority and how the public regards science.
But, you know, thinking in terms of political history, I'm very interested in questions about, you know, do we trust the government?
Do we trust what political leaders are saying?
What is the relationship between state power and a democracy?
How does the United States uphold its ideals while at the same time protecting its national security?
These are ongoing, important questions, and they're things
that I'm very interested in when I'm looking at the past. If you were doing another kind of history
where you're trying to set yourself in 1950 and say, hey, what does this look like in 1950?
That's also a very valid way of doing history, but you might get very different results. You
might find out that people in 1950 are really obsessed with something that it had never occurred
to you
to worry about. And so I think the best kinds of history really combine these two things, that
using, you know, being open to the questions of the present, because that's what's going to be
relevant to your readers or to your listeners, to really engage in issues that people are excited
about. But then to be open to what was actually happening in the moment, to find these undiscovered
stories, the surprises, things that we weren't expecting to find, but being open to what was actually happening in the moment, to find these undiscovered stories,
the surprises, things that we weren't expecting to find, being open to them and then talking about whatever it is that you're seeing happening in the past. A lot of the material, we hoped to
mention the historians and put notes in the show notes of where you can find some of this resource
material. I had, of course, I shouldn't have been surprised
that there were so many
very specific books
about very specific topics
in the Cold War.
Can you name, you know,
if our audience is intrigued,
wants to know more,
give us maybe, you know,
two or three references
that you would send them to first.
One of my favorite books
on this period
that I think got a shout out in the series, I'm
not sure if it made it into the show notes, is a book by a woman named Mary Dudziak called
Cold War Civil Rights.
And it's just a wonderful book about the relationship between international politics and domestic
politics during the Cold War period.
How concerns about the United States image abroad really
shaped conversations at home. It is a phenomenal book about how the civil rights debate played out
in the United States, filtered through the lens of Cold War politics. I absolutely recommend that
book. If you like nuclear weapons, or if you're interested in nuclear weapons, a really critical
book to read is Garrett Graff's book, Raven Rock, which was about planning
for continuity in government in the event of a nuclear attack. And the spoiler, I'm going to do
a spoiler, the spoiler in this book is that there is no real continuity of government after a nuclear
attack, that in the event of a nuclear attack, the first thing that goes is democracy. But this book
is an amazing exploration of, you know, bunkers and plans to move the Supreme Court underground or what happens in White Sulphur Springs.
I mean, it's an amazing and terrifying book. Bossers, Command and Control, which really is a harrowing account of nuclear accidents and near
misses that really gives the reader a sense of how impossible it is to keep a system like that safe.
And you have a book coming up.
I do. I was just finishing up my, I just finished up the manuscript of my second book
when I was in touch with Wondery about writing this show, which is the reason I had all of these hundreds of scholarly books at my fingertips.
So I'm writing a book about the role of science in cultural diplomacy.
It's basically a book about the relationship between science and freedom and democracy during the Cold War.
And it's called Freedom's Laboratory, The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science.
When do you expect it to be released or published?
If all goes well, there should be a fall 2018 release.
So it's not quite available for pre-order yet, but it should be hopefully by April.
Okay.
Anything else you would like to mention?
Just that this was a lot of fun.
Yeah, it was, wasn't it?
Thank you so much for talking with me.
It was a real pleasure.
And thank you for bringing us this six-part series on the Cold War.
Well, thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to talk about it with you today.
It was really so much fun working on the show.
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Our next guest on this special interview episode is Patrick Wyman.
Patrick has a Ph.D. in late antiquity history,
and he hosts two of my favorite history podcasts,
Fall of Rome and Tides of History, both from Wondery.
You can find both of these shows on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this show,
American History Tellers. Patrick is a phenomenal historical storyteller and has great insight on
the Cold War as a historical event. Here's my conversation with Patrick again via Skype.
So the term superpower was essentially a Cold War term applied to the United States,
the British Empire, and the Soviet Union after World War II. But it occurs to me that
these were not the first superpowers. I do not think so. I think that in terms of the geographic
area that it dominated, the Roman Empire was the first superpower in the West.
It was far longer-lived and more deeply rooted than something like Alexander the Great's empire, which lasted a very brief period of time.
The Persian Empire lasted longer, and it was certainly an empire and a powerful one, but it was more geographically restricted.
It touched fewer parts of the world. I think the Roman Empire really qualifies as the first and only superpower
in Western European history. It was matched in its later years by another superpower,
the Sassanid Empire of Persia. And that conflict between the Persian Empire and the later Roman
Empire, which lasted from the middle of the 3rd century
AD on until the 7th century AD when the Sassanids were overrun by the Islamic conquerors coming out
of the Arabian Peninsula. The parallels between the Cold War and the conflicts between those two
powers are hard to ignore. Part of the reason that they're hard to ignore is because when this conflict became a major topic of study was during the Cold War.
And so the lens through which modern scholars have read that conflict, have looked at those two empires, one east, one west, as it was – had a lot in common with how people were viewing the Cold War at that time.
It's hard not to read the past through the lens of the present. And the Cold War was the defining thing in international politics,
society, culture for that 50-year period.
It's hard for it not to have affected the way that we understand that particular past.
And do you think historians during the Cold War, looking back,
viewed the conflict between Rome and the Sassanids as a moral conflict,
like they might have viewed the Cold War?
I think modern scholars have tried not to see it in those terms,
because there's a kind of a sense that you should be more objective about these things.
But I think in terms of who scholars were identifying with in that particular conflict,
it was usually the Roman Empire.
I think there was a sense among Western scholars that who are you more like? In terms of who scholars were identifying with in that particular conflict, it was usually the Roman Empire.
I think there was a sense among Western scholars that we're – like who are you more like?
Who are you – not necessarily rooting for, but with whom do you identify?
It was always the Roman Empire.
The Romans themselves absolutely thought they were the good guys in this, and yes, for them there was a moral dimension to it and a religious dimension. One of the reasons that conflicts cropped up or things that were used as a pretext for conflicts was the treatment of Christians within the Sassanid Persian Empire, of whom there were many.
The Sassanids themselves were generally not Christians.
They were Zoroastrians, and they more or less left Christians alone a lot of the time.
Sometimes they didn't, and when they did not, the Romans, if they were itching for a fight, often seized on that as a reason for it. So there was a moral dimension to that, a moral and religious dimension for leading into that
conflict as a component of it. But the conflict between Rome and the Sassanids was not analogous
to the Cold War. They were in constant hostilities with each other.
Many real hot wars between the two of them.
But this is stretched out over a period of four centuries.
So there were many periods in between where there was not conflict.
There was a long period in the fifth and the sixth centuries where there's no conflict between them.
But there are always tensions, right? There are always tensions here. There's a
long borderland between the two of them. There are other interested parties. There are steppe tribes.
There are the Arab tribes that lived in that kind of contested borderland between them.
So in terms of proxy fights, this is one of the big things that scholars during the Cold War who were investigating these things were thinking about.
Were these borderlands between the two of them?
Were proxy conflicts?
Were different groups, different Arab tribes, Ghazanids and the Lakhmids, as proxies for each of the two superpowers?
And they would fight each other regularly.
So there is a
direct kind of way of looking at this that brings a Cold War lens to it.
What is the dimension of war at this time period? The beginning of the Cold War is the end of World
War II. We saw total war, in which population centers are decimated. And then, of course,
nuclear warfare. Certainly, the state of weaponry isn't the same, but how much was society as a whole affected by the rivalry?
I think if you lived in the borderlands, then a very, very great deal because the two powers were not – there was a strong frontier between the two of them. There were lots of fortifications, but there was also trade. There was intercourse going back and forth between the two of them.
If war broke out there, if you lived within a couple hundred miles on either side of that frontier, then your life was going to be deeply embedded in it.
There were constant expeditions going back and forth, constant fighting, constant raiding during those times when the conflict was either warm or hot. If you were elsewhere, what would have
affected your life was the extent to which the Roman state or the kind of Persian governmental
apparatus needed to pay for these things. So the Roman state existed to service the Roman army.
The Roman army existed in the east to protect this frontier, essentially.
That's what it was there for.
So when you paid taxes, the taxes that you were paying were going toward paying for the Roman war machine, which, again, existed essentially to hold off the Persians, to intimidate the Persians, or in some cases to fight the Persians.
That's what it was there for. So your life, your interactions with the government, with the Roman state were all predicated on needing to pay for the apparatus that would protect the empire's frontiers.
What was the competition rooted in? Was it merely dynastic, merely a grab for resources or territory? Or was there real roots in ideology or theology?
I think you can view it through a number of different lenses. The straightforward geopolitical
one is the one that makes, I think it's the one that makes the most sense, because the two powers
rubbed up against each other at various points of tension. They had interests. They were, I mean,
they were great powers. They had interests um they were i mean they were great
powers they had interests that that were often in conflict with one another um i think in terms of a
moral or ideological dimension to it we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which it was the job
of a monarch and the job it was the job of an emperor it It was the job of a Persian shah. It was the job of a lot of people there to fight, to be in conflict.
It was a worthy goal in itself.
The idea of fighting wars between these two powers was deeply attractive almost on its own terms.
That to be involved in that conflict was a justification in its own right.
As far as an ideological dimension, I mentioned the religious aspects to it. I think we shouldn't underestimate that. I think that there were a lot
of Romans who took very seriously the idea of the protection of Christians, the idea of themselves,
and kind of an emerging sense of militant piety, you might say, that there was a religious duty
on behalf of Christians, especially when you get later, especially when you get into the fifth, sixth, seventh centuries.
Like, for example, the idea of jihad that has remained very important in Islamic thought
and theology since the very beginning, that grew out of a context of militant piety among
the Persians and among the Romans of that time.
So Islam pops up in the beginning of the
7th century. That was a time of militant piety in general. There were ideological and religious
dimensions to that conflict. It was a thing that people thought at the time was important.
The Emperor Heraclius, when he goes off to fight the Sassanids, the very last great war that kind of ruined both the Eastern Roman Empire and the
Sassanids before the Islamic conquest, there was an explicitly religious dimension to that.
He was engaging in something that was like holy war. And I think we shouldn't underestimate that,
that as time went on, that conflict did take on an increasingly religious and moral angle to it. One thing that differentiates the Cold War from many others is that it was an informational
war more than anything else.
Lots of propaganda and espionage.
To what extent did information or misinformation play a role in government or conflict in the
Roman Empire?
That is an outstanding question. And it's one that a few historians have actually looked at.
There's a great book called Information and Frontiers that looks at kind of late Roman
frontiers and flows of information. My sense of this as somebody who worked a lot on communication
and on the movement of peoples is that there was quite a bit of information flow. The Romans
were very concerned about having access to
information, about making sure that there was regular and consistent communication about
record keeping. The Romans were amazing and kind of slightly obsessive compulsive record keepers.
That was the thing they were very concerned about. But so if you were like commanding a post on the
frontier, you were getting reports, written reports from elsewhere. You were sending written reports from elsewhere. There were people coming across all the time. And I think like in general, there's a lot of information flow. as zones of interaction where there was lots of things happening rather than as hard, firm lines
that were impermeable to things coming across. The Romans knew a fair bit about what was
happening in Persia. They had spies there. They kept spies there. They had diplomats who went
back and forth. The Persians had spies in Constantinople. They wanted to know what
was happening there. There was information traveling regularly because this is a world, the Roman world and the Persian world as well, were worlds they existed. That is a central defining fact.
I think that's what makes them their own particular peculiar worlds,
is the way in which there was a high volume of that kind of thing.
There was lots of information traveling all the time.
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I'm 44, which means that I was tooling around on my, you know, huffy bicycle in the middle
of the 80s.
And the Cold War was something that was profoundly real to me, but as a child, it wasn't
comprehensible. What is your personal experience
with the Cold War? Some of my earliest memories are Cold War related. I was born in 1985,
and one of my very first memories, my first two very strong memories of kind of external events
are, one, the 1988 election. I remember that very clearly.
And then, but then the next thing I remember after that, that kind of connected to a broader context was the fall of the Berlin wall. I remember that very clearly. I remember
how kind of awestruck people were by it, like this enormous thing coming down that had symbolized and
defined an entire era coming down very quickly, right? Like it seemed like it was a moment of
massive change. I remember very clearly the fall of the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember seeing Gorbachev on TV talking,
and obviously I didn't understand Russian then, still don't understand it now. But I remember
the sense of, I remember the sense of big, important things happening. I remember that
very clearly. And, but I remember what I remember very clearly, and I think this, this plays into
why I've spent as long studying the fall of the Roman empire as I have, why that's interested me so much is I remember the breakup.
Like I remember paying attention to what was happening in the former Soviet republics.
I remember the way that people were talking about that as a time of kind of endless possibility.
I remember that about the nineties because the nineties were like my formative decade. That's when I became aware of all of these things.
And so I think in terms of my own interest in a time that follows the breakup of an empire or that encompasses the breakup of an empire, I think that's what I mostly got out of it is the end of it.
That is the aftermath of it.
What does that aftermath look like?
Why do people do the things that they do? And so on. Yeah, I would agree that the end of the Cold War is one of the most instructive moments of the
entire conflict. One of the things I like about Tides of History is that you try to instill upon
your listeners the fact that history is really just a stream of individual decisions, that it
need not have gone the direction it did, but for a certain set
of circumstances. And I think the Cold War is very instructive of that lesson as well. So many
mistakes, misunderstandings, and then decisions that become intractable policy were made and
altered the course of the entire globe over a span of 50 years. And I would imagine the same for hundreds of years, given the Romans' decisions and policies.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think there's a big lesson in there about the reasons why, like, a particular decision undertaken at a particular point in time.
For example, the division of the Roman Empire into two parts in 395.
The Roman Empire had been divided before.
It would be divided again. Nobody knew at that point that that was going to be the last time
that the two empires were ruled by a single person. That was going to be the last time
they were a single unit. And yet that defined the thousand years that followed and beyond.
The decision at that particular point in time for each of the two sons, two feckless sons of a
particular emperor to get half of the empire.
Nobody knew that that was going to be a permanent thing.
And yet it was.
I think of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that I don't think anybody knew precisely how that was going to play out, that that was going to be such an inflection point for American
foreign policy, where that would lead not only in terms of Vietnam, but in terms of
what the Vietnam War did
to the American psyche
and to American expectations of what would follow that.
Like these decisions that do not necessarily seem
to be a big deal at the time
can end up having long-term ramifications.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan too.
I mean, I think same kind of thing.
Like you thought it'd be quick in and out
and yet in a deep psychological sense that scarred the Soviet Union for the
entire time that followed. How much debate do you think went into the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution, or even in more modern days, the Patriot Act? Not nearly enough. I think it seems
clear in hindsight. What's always really striking to me about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in, with the benefit of hindsight is how relatively uncontroversial it was at the time. Um, and how, uh, how many, how bipartisan it was. There were a lot of people on board for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The same thing that's, uh, I mean, I'm glad you brought up the Patriot Act. You could say the same thing for, for the decision to go to war in Iraq as well, those were well-supported. That was the kind of consensus of the political establishment,
was that these were the right things to do at those particular points in time.
But, you know, consensus is a funny thing.
I mean, certainly in politics, but it makes me think about historical consensus.
Not how the historians viewed the fall of Rome, but how histories themselves seem to fall.
I mean, clearly the fall of Rome was studied by more than just the historians of the 90s.
How did a revolution in history about history happen?
I think to some extent, we're just always going to be a prisoner of our times. We're going to be
limited by the kind of broader prevailing currents in society and in thought as a whole. I think my
way of viewing historians as an academic discipline is that we're kind of jacks of all traits.
We're not specialists in literature, but we'll use literature. We're not archaeologists,
but we may use archaeology. We're not anthropologists, but we may draw on anthropological
theory. So I think historians, more so than specialists in other fields,
are constrained by what's happening at a current moment in the world around them. I think we're
always writing, our histories of the past are always histories of our present, you know, in
some deep and meaningful way. And so when you're living in a period of time with this, where the
Soviet-U.S. relationship defines kind defines foreign relations, defines geopolitics, you
may be inclined to see the world as one of power blocks, power blocks that rub up against
each other in particular ways.
I think that's kind of what I was trying to get at with the Roman-Sassanid thing, where
now a post-Soviet, post-Cold War world is much more inclined to look at the frontiers
themselves and see how
individual people or individual groups of people living there may have interacted with each other,
where the state provides a context but isn't kind of a monolithic block.
So I think that's a big difference. But also, with some perspective on what the fall of the
Soviet Union has actually meant, that changes our perspective on what the fall of a Roman Empire may have actually meant as well. I think it gives us a
sense that these things are not static, that our understanding of them is going to change. Our
understanding of their meaning, too, about why does the fall of the Soviet Union matter, about
why does the fall of the Roman Empire matter, we're always going to read that through the lens
of our own times. All right, as we finish up here, the series on the Cold War ends with this interview episode.
We are embarking next on a series on prohibition, another portion of American history that has
deeply affected American society. So leading into that series on prohibition, I wanted to ask,
what was Rome's relationship to alcohol?
That is a great question.
That is a really wonderful question.
And because I think it gets at something that we may not think about all the time, which is that people in the past were on a kind of – had a different relationship with psychotropic substances than we ourselves do.
Which is an important thing, you know, like everybody throughout history pretty much is
kind of a general human characteristic, has tried to mess with their brain chemistry in one,
in some way, shape or form. We have a whole array of pharmaceuticals that help us do that and
illicit and illicit drugs. And we have alcohol and we have all these different ways of kind of messing with our brain chemistry. People in the past really had booze and they
consumed more of it. The average Roman would have consumed somewhere in the range of somewhere
north of a bottle of wine per day, according to normal consumption. In the medieval period,
people like an English peasant would have been drinking ale from the beginning of the day with breakfast throughout the day and all the way up till the end of the day, all the way up until bedtime.
It would have been part of their normal kind of course of life to be a little bit buzzed pretty regularly.
Same with the Romans too.
I mean if we're looking back at the Roman Empire, it would have been part of your normal experience to have alcohol in your system.
That was true in early America too. In the 1790s, there was a period of time where the average
consumption of hard liquor would have been something like a quart of whiskey a day for
your average adult male. So this is something and leading up to
prohibition too, despite the temperance movements, alcohol consumption was really heavy. Uh, it's
easy for us to kind of look back in a puritanical sense at prohibition. Um, but by our normal
standards, these people were drinking a lot all the time. There was a great deal of alcohol
consumption in a way that's kind of hard for us to understand with our array of other substances
that are available to us to, to make us feel in particular ways. They had booze and they consumed a lot of it.
So I think it behooves us to bear in mind that on a basic kind of brain chemistry level,
people in the past were experiencing the world in fundamentally different ways.
If you do drink, what is your favorite drink? I'm a beer guy.
I really like IPAs.
I grew up in an area of central Washington called Yakima that has – it's one of the world's leading hop-producing regions. So I'm really used to the smell of hops and the taste of hops.
So I love a good hoppy beer.
That is my go-to.
Well, I can grant you regional familiarity with hops, but I tend not to like IPAs.
I'm more of a roasty, malty Belgian beer type of person.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm a big fan of those as well.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Where are you taking Tides of History next?
So I think I'll be – I'm cutting off my coverage of the fall of the Roman Empire with a couple of episodes in February.
I've spent the better part of a decade working on it.
I think it's time to move on to other topics.
But I'll be continuing with the Rise of the Modern World episodes for the rest of 2018.
And then I think as we get into 2019, I'm going to move to the early Middle Ages.
I'm going to cover the Dark Ages as they're sometimes called.
And I'll be looking at the Vikings all the way up to the First Crusades, kind of early barbarian kingdoms, the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, Islamic conquests, the Vikings, and then all the way up to, yeah, the First Crusade, I'll be covering the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, some other things in
there, the printing press, conquest and exploration of the new world, the first kind of wave of
globalization.
That's what's on the docket for the rest of 2018 on Tides of History.
Okay.
So just trifles of human endeavors.
Okay.
Yeah.
Nothing particularly important.
All right.
Well, thank you again.
I really enjoyed the show, and I'm glad to have had you on this interview episode of American History Tellers.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been a pleasure watching American History Tellers get out there.
You've put together a really amazing show.
Thank you very much.
This has been the end of our series on the Cold War.
But next time on American History Tellers, we will be starting a brand new six-episode series on another important period in our nation's history,
Prohibition. Here's a preview.
When we think of Prohibition, we imagine flappers, jazz music, speakeasies, and bootleggers.
Federal agents hunting down Al Capone,
reformers pouring bottles of liquor into gutters in a frenzy of self-righteousness.
Next on American History Tellers,
a six-part series on the story of our nation's experiment with sobriety.
We'll look at how a changing America made banning booze possible in the first place,
and how a constitutional amendment that outlawed alcohol
accidentally started a party that lasted for 14 years. in the first place, and how a constitutional amendment that outlawed alcohol accidentally
started a party that lasted for 14 years. Listen next week as we start our next series
on American History Tellers. Our history, your story.
From Wondery, this is episode 8 of 8 of The Cold War from American History Tellers. In our next series, on January 17, 1920, the United States passed the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ushering in a 13-year dry spell known as Prohibition.
But how did a country that loved to drink turn its back on alcohol? If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now
by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free
on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey
at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship.
Executive producers are Marshall Louis, Ben Adair, and Hernán López for Wondery.
In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands.
But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed.
It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse,
and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud.
Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers.
We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all,
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In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis
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Taking the name Robert Maxwell,
he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe.
But ambition eventually curdles into desperation,
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